Summon your creative moments!

Have you ever had an "Aha!" moment after reading an insightful article that explains something that you've long experienced but weren't exactly sure whether it was a "real" thing and a known phenomena? I recently had this kind of moment after reading couple of articles about one's "creative flow" at Steve Pavlina weblog and I thought: man this stuff is so dead on, I gotta share it with everybody! But here's the kicker: I'm going to put my own visual illustration twist on this subject and give you a nice, concise and memorable step-by-step guide to relive your creative moments based on Steve's brilliant 7 Rules for Maximizing Your Creative Output. Reliving your creative moments isn't just for the fun of it, it will help you get your creative fluid juices running again which will let you tap into your creative potential to create awesome works of art in whatever it is you do professionally.

Some Background

Turns out this phenomena we're talking about, one's creative flow, or simply the "flow", is a long-known one studied and proposed by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. The Wikipedia's entry on this subject states that the:

Flow is the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing, characterized by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity.

So you'll know you're in the flow when..

• you're resistant to anything that tries to interrupt you or put you out of it
• you lose all sense of time
• you forget about your basic needs like hunger or sleep
• you don't feel like what you're doing is work as much as trying to achieve that goal you set out to achieve

Rings any bells? I bet everyone of us has experienced all or some of these symptoms at some point in time. I know I did. At my previous job, I used to diss off people who'd interrupt me during peak working hours for trivial matters. I got a reputation for being cranky or having "the bad day", but really what it was is just me trying to keep the pace of my flow going in order to fix that nasty bug or roll out that long overdue feature. But now I know better, because with these rules, I know exactly how to initiate and maintain a creative and productive working session. So let's explore these rules in details, shall we?

Preparation: What needs to be done beforehand

Because maintaining a steady flow of creative ideas requires complete focus on your goal and ultimate objective, you will need to take care of the following 3 things first:

1. Set up your own conductive environment. It depends on your preference whether you want to work within stimulating and active environment or prefer secluded and quite environments (like me). Also you might want to play some music along, you know the kind that gets you going.
2. Master the tools of your trade. In my opinion, nothing kills creative flow of ideas like getting stuck on some technical issue related to the tool(s) you're using during your creative session. A basic competency of these tools is a must to minimize disrupting your flow.
3. Allocate enough time that you think will take you to finish the task at hand

Define your scope

Some people have a habit of drifting out of their real goal when they follow their natural progression of ideas. You know what I'm talking about: you're trying to do something and it leads to something else seemingly related, and before you know it you're tackling a whole different problem than the one you set out to do. While this is clearly a prospect for innovation, when your creative energy is shattered among several different problems, it quickly wears you out and you end up achieving none, or at least not the one you were meant to achieve. This is why you need to consider the following 3 points which will help you "tunnel" your creative ideas into something productive and worthwhile:

1. Define a clear purpose. You're going to need a clear goal to focus on. Decide on what you want to create and by all means avoid vague goals. This is your ultimate objective and achieving it will likely trigger the end of your creative flow and make you feel good about yourself!
2. Identify a compelling motive. Why is your goal important to achieve? When you answer this question, you align this goal with your real-world objectives which will give you powerful driving force towards achieving it. You know, most short- or long-term goals, like our new year's resolutions, fail to see the light not because they're impossibly unattainable, but because we failed to associate them upstart with a compelling motive that keeps us going at times of weakness.
3. Architect a worthy challenge. There are tasks that are just too darn easy to need your full creative energy. And then again, there are those that are too damn difficult that makes you want to kill yourself. More so than often, we get to choose how challenging our tasks should be. If so, then you need to know that on a scale of of 1-10, where 1 is trivially easy and 10 is impossible, the optimal creative range is 5-9 with a 7-8 being ideal. A wise man once said:
   

   Achieving flow is a fine balance from feeling bored to feeling overwhelmed.

Ready? Go!

That's it! If you have all those elements (preparation + scope) figured out and accounted for, then you're ready to start. It will normally take you 15 minutes to begin to enter the flow state. Within 45-60 minutes, you'll be riding the waves of your creativity! But then again, it all depends on you and the nature of your task. Save and use the following figure to help remind you of the stuff we talked about today. Wish you all the best!